LMR LTE Interworking Services from Catalyst compliant with 3GPP Standards for Mission Critical Push to Talk
Catalyst Communications Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of IP-based Dispatch, Interoperability and Incident Command solutions for Critical Communications, demonstrated its solution with other leading vendors of mission critical communications services at the recent ETSI sponsored plugtest. Catalyst was able to demonstrate LMR LTE interworking and dispatch while conforming with the Mission Critical Push To Talk (MCPTT) standard as defined in 3GPP Releases.
ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute), with the support of the European Commission, EFTA, TCCA and UIC, organized the fifth MCX Plugtests event. This year’s testing took place as a remote-only event from 21st September to 9th October 2020 as a result of COVID-19.
According to ETSI, Plugtests events serve two main purposes: They provide essential feedback to our technical committees to help us improve our standards and to accelerate the standards-making process, and they enable engineers to get together to test the interoperability of their implementations – which can reduce a product’s time-to-market. The benefits of such events include: improving the interoperability of products and services, supporting the deployment of new technologies, enabling networking between partners, competitors and other experts, and validating our standards. The concept of “Mission Critical Push To Talk (MCPTT)”, “Mission Critical Data (MCData)” and “Mission Critical Video (MCVideo)” started with 3GPP Release-13 and is ongoing in current Releases. Interoperability and Mission Critical service harmonization are critical challenges for the successful deployment and operation of Mission Critical Communication. Catalyst provides LMR LTE Interworking services that are compliant with the 3GPP standard for mission critical voice, and on the LMR side, compliant with standards developed for P25 and DMR, and a number of vendor specific radio communications and control interfaces.
For the 5th ETSI MCX Plugtests Event, Catalyst’s goal was to connect our MCPTT Gateway to other vendor’s MC Application Servers to test interoperability through several test cases that make up the 3GPP Release-15 MC Services standard. Our primary focus was to configure our product and demonstrate MCPTT functionalities with different MCS Application Servers while also gaining access to MCX Services that are not available in our lab. Catalyst has tested compatibility with a significant number of other vendors who are building mission critical applications in conformance with the 3GPP standard. Catalyst believes that these types of collaborative events between different manufacturer’s and their solutions is instrumental in creating and maintaining Mission Critical interoperability that is technology and vendor agnostic.
